Poor Things [2023]

 Poor Things is possibly Lanthimos’ most unreservedly ambitious film to date – ribald, outré and gleefully grotesque – while also being situated in his distinctively weird aesthetic palettes and expressions. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, it conjured a wildly imaginative blend of period setting and punk-dystopia, and thereby a mix of black humour, body horror, sci-fi fantasy, existential inquiries and feminist fable. Yet, for all its absurdist splashes, it was also ultimately an exercise in humanism and morality, and therefore bereft of the wickedly savage and deadpan nihilism that he’d pursued so far. Consequently, for all its fantastical imagery, extravaganza and provocations, it demonstrated that he’s either mellowing with age or attempting an expanded audience (or both). Set in cartoonish Victorian England – flamboyantly evoked through zany cinematography, garish backdrops and discordant scores – it’s centred on Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of a child in the body of a woman. This freakish contradiction is the result of the handiwork of mad scientist Godwin (Willem Defoe) – who she unironically calls “God” – as he revived a woman who’s committed suicide by transplanting an unborn child’s brain into her. Unapologetically gauche, outrageously libidinous and infinitely curious, she embarks on a wild adventure of self-learning, first with the gloriously louche Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) – their romps represented the film’s most enjoyable sections – and then as a prostitute at a Parisian brothel where she’s drawn to socialist ideas. The drab final segment and some self-consciously serious set-pieces, unfortunately, were dampeners. Excellent performances aside – Stone was particularly fearless and nuanced – the film comprised of a charming cameo by Hanna Schygulla and droll inter-species hybrids reminiscent of Sukumar Ray’s unforgettable nonsense poem ‘Khichuri’ (“Hodgepodge”).

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Sci-Fi/Black Comedy/Fantasy/Romantic Comedy/Existentialist Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Last Summer [2023]

 Catherine Breillat proves with Last Summer that, even in her mid-70s, she hasn’t lost either her propensity or her appetite to defy norms and push the envelope in matters involving uncomfortable, unorthodox and amoral expressions of women’s private desires. Made a decade after her previous film Abuse of Weakness, this remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts marked an intriguing overlap between prestige cinema aesthetics and dangerously salacious themes. Its central crux – viz. a forbidden affair between a middle-aged woman and her teenage stepson – might’ve been tailormade for an exercise in saucy softcore in most other filmmakers’ hands; but, not in Breillat’s, as her objective was a non-exploitative and non-judgemental dive into a queasy and murky quagmire that a problematic relationship such as this constitutes, alongside the associated elements of sexual politics and power, and made in the kind of measured, unsentimental and analytic style that’s – in absence of a suitable term – oh-so French. In the narrative’s sharpest irony, Anne (Léa Drucker) is a capable and committed attorney who represents victims of sexual abuse, which therefore underscored how transgressions can often defy easy pigeonholing. Furthermore, the way her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), with whom her marriage has long entered a stage of convenient stasis, decides to believe her over his moody and rebellious son Théo (Samuel Kircher) – when he decides to reveal the secret liaison on account of the angst he experiences upon Anne’s decision to break-off – disconcertingly presaged the devastating revelations concerning Alice Munro. The film was at its strongest in the first and last thirds, separated by a relatively staid middle section when the affair actually unfolds, and was led by a courageous turn by Drucker.

Director: Catherine Breillat

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marital Drama

Language: French

Country: France

El Conde [2023]

 In Pablo Larraín’s grisly, hyperbolic, farcical and pungently satirical horror-comedy El Conde, the despotic former Chilean dictator is both literally and metaphorically a hideously decrepit, blood-sucking and heart-chomping vampire. Made as a zany overlap between German expressionism, bawdy humour and political absurdism – and deliberately as an exercise in lowbrow grotesquerie to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1973 coup – the film recalled two thematic tropes that’ve recurred in the filmmaker’s splendid oeuvre, viz. memories from the military dictatorship years (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) and unconventional stabs at biopics (Neruda, Jackie, Spencer). This oddball mix of aesthetic experimentation and narrative flippancy sees Pinochet – a French royalist who’d fought against the dissidents during the French Revolution, and finally fulfilled his lust of royal grandeur by illegally grabbing power in Chile – living a banished, ignominious existence since being kicked out of power, with his scheming wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra), and Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), his macabre White Russian butler who loved exterminating Communists. When his conniving kids get a hint of Pinochet’s suicidal tendencies – ironically, he’s more pissed at being called a thief than a murderer – they descend like a pack of vultures to seize his ill-gotten wealth. Meanwhile, a saucy Catholic nun straight out of a lurid Verhoeven slasher (Paula Luchsinger), in the guise of an accountant, arrives to track his dirty money trail and thereafter exorcize him. Shot in deliciously high-contrast B/W, filled with droll set-pieces, and imbued with a gothic and wintry atmosphere recalling earlier Scandinavian cinema, the freakish power struggle is dryly narrated – as it hilariously turns out – by the hawkish former British PM Margaret Thatcher, who isn’t just a fellow blood-sucking vampire but Pinochet’s borderline-incestuous mother too.

Director: Pablo Larrain

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Horror

Language: Spanich/English

Country: Chile

Viduthalai Part 1 [2023]

 Vetrimaaran’s blistering Tamil film Viduthalai Part 1 – it was planned as a single work, but later decided for release in two parts – delved into inflammatory political topics and fearlessly questioned mainstream narratives, over its expansive scope. The director used both popular and agitational narrative devices while depicting how those fighting for their rights are branded enemies of the state; civic and judicial boundaries are brazenly transgressed – in the name of ushering “development” and battling “militancy” – while suppressing any dissidence against the state; flagrant police brutality and custodial tortures; and the ironic scenario wherein those representing the lowest rung within the armed forces – paid pittance, denied basic conditions, and treated like non-entities by the chain of command – are made to sacrifice their lives and their humanity while waging brutal wars. The said lowest common denominator here is the newly-recruited Kumaresan (Soori), who’s joined a police unit stationed at a dense forest in order to eliminate the rebel tribal leader Perumal (Vijay Sethupathi), who’s violently opposing handing over of their lands to a mining company. The naïve protagonist, employed as a driver and factotum, immediately falls foul of the savage OC upon disobeying orders while helping a villager; this, in turn, leads to a touching romance with an orphaned tribal girl (Bhavani Sre), growing consciousness upon witnessing the bending of truths and perpetration of brutality by his colleagues, and increasing awareness of the man who the state calls a villain but respected as “teacher” by the local villagers. The film’s bravura and stunningly orchestrated 8-minute single-take opening sequence – capturing the grief, chaos and myriad activities at the site of a devastating train derailment – had set the stage for this riveting work.

Director: Vetrimaaran

Genre: Crime/Thriller/Action/War

Language: Tamil

Country: India

Four Daughters [2023]

 The line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking – and in turn between the supposed candour of the former and the inherent artifice in the latter – was boldly blurred by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania in her stunning genre-bending documentary Four Daughters. What unfolded in her formally adventurous work – that involved gutsy deconstruction of truth, memory and complex past experiences – was ultimately a daring psychoanalytic exercise in therapy and catharsis, wherein renewed interpretations of past traumas through the prism of time are hoped to enable clarity and peace. The film’s tricky hybrid setup is established at the outset. Olfa Hamrouni’s two eldest daughters Ghofrane and Rahma disappeared in 2015 while still teenagers, in order to join ISIS; Ben Hania, in order to understand what led to their descent into lunacy and the bruise that was left in its wake, deployed two female actors to enact them, well-known actress Hend Sabri to play Olfa when things got emotionally difficult, and a male actor to play the abusive men in her life, along with Olfa and her two younger daughters Eya and Tayssir – playing themselves while recreating key stages from their shared lives – to craft this devastating tale of grief, anguish and loss. The docu comprises of underlying elements of enactment and simulation, and the manipulative possibilities therein, made it an uncomfortable watch at times, aside from being an unsettling one too. These, nevertheless, complemented its formal audacity, and the extraordinary courage that Olfa, Eya and Tayssir displayed in reliving their intensely private anecdotes. Furthermore, it’s also filled with disarming humour, deep sincerity and delicate tenderness that mellowed its darker, painful and harrowing components, and took exploitative possibilities out of the film’s framework.

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Tunisia

The Mother of All Lies [2023]

 Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s extraordinary documentary The Mother of All Lies, through defiant remembrances, delivered a powerful affirmation of how a rebellion can be delivered by reinstating suppressed memories and shattering the veil of silence. Furthermore, it demonstrated how an act of recollecting and articulating old trauma can heal wounds and enable reconciliations. That a tapestry that’s so fragile and complex can be weaved with such formal dare, narrative idiosyncrasy and stylistic ingenuity – with the director both orchestrating and participating in this expression of personal and collective catharsis – made this a work of singular brilliance. Its starting point is the lack of photographs of El Moudir’s family and herself on account of their prohibition by her stern and authoritarian grandmother Zahra. Hence, to circumvent this chasm, her father has recreated her childhood home in Casablanca, immediate neighbourhood and residents. This meticulously designed and exceptionally constructed miniature diorama added an absorbing sense of here-and-now to reminiscences of quirky old habits, memories both fond and disquieting, unreconciled familial fault-lines, and eventually a dark political episode. In 1981, the soaring prices of breads had been the final straw for the eruption of riots, which were violently crushed by the military, followed by attempted erasure, resulting in hundreds of deaths and bodies thereafter buried in nameless graves. The filmmaker’s neighbours – Said, who wrote protest poems; Abdallah, who was illegally jailed for many years; the mother of 12-year-old Fatima who was shot and her body disappeared, and finally memorialized decades later – shared their devastating stories, situating them in the miniature installations. Zahra, incidentally, might well have been personating a version of herself, and this potentially performative element further emphasized the work’s audacious fluidity.

Director: Asmae El Moudir

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Morocco

Bye Bye Tiberias [2023]

 French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem’s delicately strung, lyrically shaped and deeply intimate diary film Bye Bye Tiberias, like Karim Aïnouz’s similarly evocative ciné-memoir Mariner of the Mountains, is an eloquently crafted expression of the search for one’s homeland and roots, guided by memories, and driven by the longing for a lost space and time. A journey like this, therefore is as much temporal as it’s spatial, and equally emotional and physical. It’s also a moving expression of female and familial solidarity, through its remembrance of and meditations on four generations of women whose lives have been one of displacement and exile. What emerged through this deceptively intricate assemblage is a layered tapestry informed by the interconnectedness of the personal and the political. Hiam Abbass – professional movie actress, amateur poet and the filmmaker’s mother – had emigrated to France in her 20s to escape and pursue acting. Her daughter’s birth had restored the shaken ties to her family. And now, in her 60s, she agrees to recount their family saga –grandmother Um Ali who, along with her family, was forced to leave their home in Tiberias during the 1948 Nakba; granddad Hosni who died of grief; aunt Hosnieh who’d taken shelter in a refugee camp in Syria and was separated for 30 years; mom Nemat who became a teacher and raised eight kids; her father who loved recording family events on camera; her sisters who’ve lived under the occupation – and take a cathartic trip along with her daughter. This, therefore, was simultaneously a tale of violence, loss and anguish – and, in turn, a bleak reminder of the unabated persecution of the Palestinian people across generations – as one of resilience, resistance and reconciliation.

Director: Lina Soualem

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film

Language: French/Arabic

Country: Palestine

In Flames [2023]

 It’s perhaps neither coincidental nor surprising that in the two films from Pakistan that gained international acclaim in consecutive years – Salim Sadiq’s sublime and rapturous Joyland, and Zarrar Kahn’s eery and visceral In Flames – women’s fierce desire to exert their agency in defiance of patriarchy were incontestably manifest. The Western liberal backgrounds of both filmmakers undeniably influenced, informed and shaped their films’ feral thematic undercurrents and bold storytelling. The pervading everyday horrors of the real world – misogyny, gender violence, predatory behaviour and familial abuse – were interwoven into the film’s milieu and tapestry, and in turn counterpointed as well as triggered and even amplified the horrors emanating from the supernatural realms in this gripping work. Set in the gritty city of Karachi, a compelling mother-daughter relationship – both trying in futility come to terms with grief and trauma – foregrounded the tale. Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) is a strikingly independent-minded twenty-something girl who’s studying medicine, while her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar) is a single woman taking care of her two kids through her job as a schoolteacher; the violent conclusion to Farah’s abusive husband when Mariam was little, meanwhile, continues to haunt both. The demise of Mariam’s maternal grandfather has suddenly placed them in a financially vulnerable position, and her slimy uncle descends like a vulture with his eyes on their modest property. The situation’s grimness is marginally allayed when Mariam gets in a tender relationship with a gentle-natured Canada-returned guy (Omar Javaid). However, when their romantic getaway to the seaside goes awry, a malignant can of worms is thrown open, taking them on a hellish spiral. Nawal and Mazhar’s competent turns aided the commendable interplay between chilling atmosphere and sharp social critique.

Director: Zarrar Kahn

Genre: Horror/Family Drama/Supernatural Drama

Language: Urdu

Country: Pakistan

Libertate (Freedom) [2023]

 Revolutions, once shorn of the allure of romanticism, can be bloody, messy and grimy affairs, and that’s the first thing that one notices in Tudor Giurgiu’s thrilling film Libertate, which takes us right into its violent, chaotic and unpredictable midst. What one also notices is the director’s audacious gambit in filming with an absurdly large ensemble cast that must’ve necessitated meticulous orchestration while rendering the madness. In a country obsessed with episodes from the Ceausescu era, the dictator’s fall from power – the only one among the “Revolutions of 1989” that experienced violence – and its immediate aftermaths, it’s certainly not easy to find new stories; Giurgiu surprisingly succeeded in that. This ironically titled work – contrary to the rousing sentiments it alludes to, the film is anything but triumphal – chronicled the brutal confrontation that ensues during Ceausescu’s overthrow, followed by a period of absurdist stalemate, in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. Little did police officer Viorel (Alex Calangiu) know, upon leaving for work on the fateful day of the uprising, that he'd barely survive by the skin of his neck and return after months in bizarre captivity. When shots are fired into protestors by unknown assailants, a vicious pandemonium takes the city to the brink of civil war, and pits four mutually hostile factions against each other – the army, police, secret service and civilians. The army eventually seizes the upper hand, and holds more than 500 people – belonging to the latter groups, with each accusing the other of being lackeys and terrorists – in an emptied swimming pool. The narrative shifted at a breakneck pace between diverse characters, interlocking verbal clashes and psychological duels, taking the film to a bleak anti-climactic finale.

Director: Tudor Giurgiu

Genre: Thriller/Historical Thriller

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

The Pigeon Tunnel [2023]

 A meeting between renowned American documentarian Errol Morris – his examination of the slippery nature of truth, by sifting through deceptive non-truths, has been a running theme in his filmography, and most famously touched upon in his canonized work The Thin Blue Line – and celebrated British spy novelist David Cornwell – who, through his best-selling books pseudonymously written as John le Carré, had repeatedly delved into the subversion and obfuscation of truth – was, on paper, a match made in heaven. Furthermore, Cornwell sat for this rare interview just prior to his death on Morris’ behest, thus enabling this momentous rendezvous. However, for anyone who’s read le Carré’s enticing and engrossing memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, there was unfortunately nothing new in this partial transliteration of that marvellous volume. While the book, through droll irony, had audaciously cut across through myriad fascinating anecdotes from the writer’s eventful life, Morris probed predominantly into one specific aspect only, viz. Cornwell’s complex relationship with his father Ronnie – a compulsive career conman who was perennially on the run – which remained the great unresolved equation in his life. While that served as terrific material, made all the more arresting by his sardonic and surprisingly candid articulation of that difficult chapter from his life, Morris kept stopping short of provoking new memories and revelations beyond what Cornwell had already let loose in his memoir. While, in a captivating stylistic choice, the author’s responses were juxtaposed with footage from four highly reckoned adaptations (Martin Ritt’s haunting The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the three acclaimed BBC miniseries Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and A Perfect Spy), dramatizations and overemphasis of the title’s meaning, however, felt tepid.

Director: Errol Morris

Genre: Documentary/Biopic

Language: English

Country: UK

The Lying Life of Adults [2023]

 The chaotic messiness of life, the anxiety-laden process of reconciling with that, and the complexities that people must often navigate through vis-à-vis familial and class backgrounds, are running strands in Elena Ferrante’s novels, and the same vividly held true in her captivating book The Lying Life of Adults. Edoardo De Angelis placed these at the forefront in his commendable adaptation – co-written by Ferrante herself – into the miniseries form. Giovanna (Giordana Marengo) is an intelligent, perceptive and soft-spoken, but inwardly obstinate, restless and emotionally muddled adolescent girl. Unsure of her footing, she finds herself drifting while growing up in a well-off nuclear family, comprising of erudite and left-leaning parents, in 1990s Naples. Upon overhearing her father’s offhand remark about her growing resemblance to her estranged Aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino) – who her father had violently fallen out with many years back, turning her into persona non grata in their family – she develops a gnawing curiosity to meet her. And when that eventually happens – which necessitates a journey from the cloistered bourgeoisie world that she inhabits to the gritter and seedier side of the city, thus crossing irreconcilable societal borders in the process – the impact of that spins her out of her axis. As her relationship starts deepening with this brash, volatile and overly religious woman – alternately magnetic and repulsive – she finds herself noticing the fault-lines in her family and questioning her own identity, which brings forth a rebellious streak in her that pushes her towards forging a radical new path for herself. Though certain sections felt tad superfluously etched, striking turns by Marengo and Golino, strong political undercurrents, impressive visual designs, and eclectic electronic soundtrack made for a rollicking viewing experience.

Director: Edoardo De Angelis

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Coming-of-Age/Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Pictures of Ghosts [2023]

 Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts – a confluence of diary, essay, sociocultural document and city symphony – is an idiosyncratic mosaic and personal meditation on how the director’s journey as a cinephile and evolution as a filmmaker are inextricably tied to Recife, the ever-changing Brazilian coastal city which is his home. He made intricate use of memories, reflections, interactions, footage from his own canon – low-fi home videos, clippings from shorts he made as a budding amateur, sequences from his compelling first two features Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius (the former, in fact, was filmed extensively in his own apartment) – and other historical artefacts while composing this playful convergence of autobiographical montage and personalized observations. It’s broken into three episodes where each expands and shifts the scope vis-à-vis the preceding one. In the first section, “The Setúbal Apartment”, which is confined to his flat and served as a miniature memoir, he speaks of the influence of his mother, and transition of his hobby into vocation. The second chapter, “The Cinemas of Downtown Recife”, focussed on the beautiful old theatres that he’d frequented as a teenager and were hallowed joints for the city’s cinephiles, and in turn chronicled how Racife was once a target for Nazi propaganda in the 1940s, and later a throbbing place for filmmakers and film lovers, until – as he ruefully muses – “capital moved elsewhere”. The final segment, “Churches and Holy Ghosts”, is an alternately satiric and melancholic examination of the famous theatres’ transmogrification into malls, crumbling relics, and even churches. This exploration of the demise of old single-screen theatres, incidentally, reminded me of two films on similar themes, viz. Tsai’s haunting masterpiece Goodbye Dragon Inn and Kaushik Ganguly’s Cinemawalla.

Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Diary Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

And, Towards Happy Alleys [2023]

 And, Towards Happy Alleys – to paraphrase its director Sreemoyee Singh’s cogent summation – is a political film, albeit made poetically. This delicate balance between its eloquent feminist voice and wistfully lyrical aesthetics, as well as defiant expression of solidarity and touchingly intimate diary form, both informed and shaped this remarkable documentary essay. Germinated during her doctoral thesis, and over six years in the making during which the Jadavpur University alumnus made frequent trips to Iran, stayed for stretches in Tehran, and even learnt Persian to enable better cultural appreciation and meaningful exchanges, this pean to Iranian cinema, poetry, and collective resistance by the country’s women, artists, activists and citizens – against patriarchy, repression and censorship – marked a stirring transition for her from Film Studies into filmmaking. It covered a surprisingly large ground for its brisk length – interviews with the great dissenting auteur Jafar Panahi, fearless human rights activist Nasrin Sotudeh, actor Mohammad Shirvani et al; paying heartfelt homages to the iconoclastic feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad and filmmaking giant Abbas Kiarostami; observing people and life through her empathetic lens; and cataloguing her lived experiences in this vibrant city. The film, interestingly, is filled with memorable moments that added ironic, self-reflexive and even metatextual touches – Panahi cheekily evoking Taxi Tehran; Aida Mohammadkhani’s emotionally charged reliving of The White Balloon by locking gaze with Panahi; director Mohammad Shirvani’s views on eroticism getting inadvertently “censored” by his neighbour’s drilling machine; Singh’s melodious crooning of Persian songs gaining rousing meanings given the ban on solo female singing; reimagining of Offside during the 2018 football World Cup; and foreshadowing the ‘Mahsa Amini Protests’ that would lead to 38 years’ imprisonment for Sotudeh subsequent to her interviews here.

Director: Sreemoyee Singh

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Diary Film

Language: English/Persian

Country: India

Against the Tide [2023]

 Watching Sarvnik Kaur’s poignant and poetic documentary Against the Tide, one’s immediately transfixed by the exacting chronicling of her deeply moving subject, given the long and arduous shooting conditions that it must’ve entailed. However, what enthralled me most was her fluid blending of narrative storytelling – and therefore fictive elements – into the nonfiction form, and the formal elasticity accorded by that. It draws particularly fascinating parallels with fellow Jamia Millia Islamia alumnus Shaunak Sen’s masterful docu All That Breathes. The nuanced and evolving portraiture – over the course of a year – of two friends belonging to the marginalized Koli community and tirelessly striving to sustain their piscine vocations, brings to mind the powerful delineation of avian passions of the two ghettoized Muslim brothers. The story of this indigenous fishing community – whose lives and livelihoods have been pushed to the edges on account of displacements due to Mumbai’s reconstructed cityscape, and rapid depletion of stock exacerbated by industrialized fishing, climate change and marine pollution – is evoked through two fiercely intimate friends, albeit separated by class and pursuing contrasting routes. Rakesh lives an impoverished existence with his wife and mother, having opted to continue pursuing traditional fishing in the shallow seas in his frayed old boat with a seasonal crew; Ganesh has moved up the socioeconomic ladder and lives in the city with his wife, but is stuck in the vicious loop of raising capital to go deeper into the sea using expensive crew and equipment, and drowning in debt as a consequence. The brilliantly shot work, with its underlying theme of tradition vis-à-vis modernization, is hauntingly bookended by two births and imbued with stirring echoes through recurrent use of a plaintive dirge.

Director: Sarvnik Kaur

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Marathi/Hindi

Country: India

Godzilla Minus One [2023]

 If collective national trauma emanating from Japan’s dark martial past, especially pertaining to WW2 and its aftermaths, informed Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, these were in the foreground of Godzilla Minus One, the smashing new entrant in this long-running kaiju franchise featuring one of Japan’s biggest pop-culture icons. The narrative begins towards the end of the war when, facing certain defeat, Japan notoriously deployed kamikaze pilots for suicide attacks. Upon letting pragmatism and survival instincts trump over the dated concepts of honour and valour – inevitably construed as shameful cowardice by his countrymen – Kōichi (Kamiki Ryûnosuke) feigns technical snags to make an unannounced landing at a small island, where we have our first sighting of the angry reptilian monster. Plagued by immense survivor’s guilt upon his return to a ravaged Tokyo after the war, he tries settling down with his found-family comprising of a woman who’s lost her family (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned kid, but eventually joins a ragtag crew of fellow vets tasked with diffusing naval mines which are dark remnants of the war. Meanwhile, relentless nuclear tests by the US at Bikini Atoll have brought about deadly mutations to Godzilla, making it not just infinitely more massive and ferocious, with an ability to produce devastating heat rays, but nearly indestructible too. Consequently, when it starts causing massive damages upon reaching the Japanese shores, former weapons engineer (Hidetaka Yoshioka) devises an ingenious, if enormously convoluted plan, to defeat this primordial beast. Buoyed by spectacular visual effects, the director delivered a commendable mix of scintillating sequences, deliberately melodramatic human story, and a dismal historical setting reminiscent of Japanese New Wave films that added vital meanings to the proceedings.

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure/Family Drama/Creature Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

The Boy and the Heron [2023]

 What immediately arrests one about The Boy and the Heron – the first film in a decade by legendary octogenarian Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, who came out of his retirement to make this, and the 25^th feature production by Studio Ghibli – are its dazzling, painstakingly handcrafted and decidedly anachronistic 2D artwork. Miyazaki was heavily inspired by the 1937 Japanese novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino (the film’s original title is, in fact, a direct nod to the book); he also self-consciously looked back at his own childhood days and filmography while conceiving this story, which made it semi-autobiographical and self-reflexive. It begun against the harrowing backdrop of WW2 as young Hisako loses his mother to a tragic fire accident. As the war rages on, he finds himself displaced to tranquil rural environs when his father, an ecstatic manufacturer of fighter planes for the military, marries his sister-in-law and relocates to her large estate. There, haunted by his memories and engulfed in debilitating grief, Hisako finds himself lost amidst his new mom and a group of eccentric old ladies, and becomes even more withdrawn upon facing bullying at the local school. That’s when he encounters a speaking, anthropomorphic Heron who mocks him out of his stupor and provokes him into a parallel world – filled with blazing phantasmagoria and outlandish creatures – where he must overcome fantastical obstacles to save his old and new moms. Wildly imaginative and heavily metaphorical – especially around its underlying evocations of past, present and future – the film took an uninhibited turn after having begun on a low-key note, which made it seem messy and overdone on occasions, its affecting mix of loss, melancholy and hope notwithstanding.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Genre: Animation/Fantasy/Adventure/Coming of Age

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

In Our Day [2023]

 Hong Sang-soo’s chatty yet deadpan In Our Day – made in his characteristically unadorned visual language, unassuming aesthetic grammar and the kind of radical cinematic purity that he’s obsessively internalized – comprises of two parallel threads with such a fleeting link that they might as well be happening at different points in time rather than simultaneously. However, the way these two mirrored each other – in their succinct structures, trio of characters that includes a weary former artist and a visiting young admirer, being steadfastly confined in an apartment, rambling conversations that hint at dwelling on the larger questions of life only to impishly pull back, and the way they ambled along – gave it the form of a wistful diptych. The first thread is centred around a retired movie actress (Kim Min-hee) who has put up at the apartment of an old friend (Song Sunmi) where she’s visited by a naïve cousin aspiring to become an actress. The second thread is set in the flat of an ageing former poet (Ki Joo-bong) – who’s been asked by his doctor to stay off alcohol and cigarettes and has suddenly attained cult following among young readers – is the subject of a documentary being made by a young film student (Park Miso) as part of her coursework, while a callow young guy visits him for insights into art and life. The film, typical of Hong’s love for locating existential truths within his miniature cavasses – oftentimes through wry digressions and ambling drifts – includes a lazy cat, a forgotten guitar, playing “rock paper scissors”, trying non-alcoholic beers, and most memorably, savouring ramen with chili paste. The poet, by the way, does eventually fall back on soju and smoke.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Slice of Life

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea

La Chimera [2023]

 Time and history are fluid, elusive and mysterious in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, an oddball mix of whimsy, irony and melancholy, with burlesque splashes reminiscent of Fellini and Pasolini thrown in. The film’s roguish and eccentric anti-hero Arthur (Josh O'Connor) – an alternately disreputable and righteous British archaeologist of unknown backstory who’s involved with a group of boisterous tombaroli (grave robbers) who’re into scavenging antique artefacts that the Italian lands teem with, while being haunted by memories of a lost love – formed a sardonic embodiment of its seriocomic tone and temporal themes, as he’s continually switching between ancient and near pasts. As the film starts, he’s just been released from prison, and despite moral pangs, he rejoins the colourful gang and leads them using his preternatural abilities in locating the right spots to dig, while dodging the suspicious cops on their tails and scandalizing the locals through their sacrilegious defiling of sacred traditions. Shot by Hélène Louvart – who sumptuously captured the landscapes’ rough beauty, and made playful use of multiple formats and speeds – and accompanied by an earthy and bawdy texture that complemented the script’s sensuous undercurrents and magic realism, the film served as irreverent satire and elegiac meditation on human’s insatiable lust and profane greed. The arresting O’Connor spearheaded a fine cast comprising of Carol Duarte as the alluring Italia who’s drawn towards Arthur and hilariously teaches him Italian hand signals, Isabella Rossellini as the tough yet sentimental mother of Arthur’s lost lover, Vincenzo Nemolato as a gangly scoundrel, and Alba Rohrwacher as a smooth-talking shark. One of the film’s most captivating treasures was a rueful folkloric ballad that added wispy, offbeat and metatextual layers to the quixotic proceedings.

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Adventure/Romance/Magic Realism

Language: Italian/English

Country: Italy

Close Your Eyes [2023]

 What could be more meta and self-reflexive than a filmmaker directing a feature-length work after three decades, centred on a filmmaker who abruptly stopped making movies three decades back! Victor Erice, best remembered for his celebrated debut film The Spirit of the Beehives – an allegorical anti-Francoist parable that’s attained mythic position in the annals of Spanish cinema – directed one feature per decade for the next two decades, but hadn’t made any since 1992’s Dream of Light. Understandably, the anticipation for Close Your Eyes, ever since it was announced, was massive among cinephiles, and fortunately one isn’t left disappointed. It begins with the muted footage of a film within film from early-90s, titled The Farewell Gaze, around a wealthy old man hiring a former anti-fascist partisan to find his lost daughter. The leading actor, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), mysteriously disappeared midway – it was assumed that he’d committed suicide, but his body was never found – which led to its director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) – also a close friend of Julio’s – abandoning the film, quitting filmmaking, and retiring to a reclusive existence at a fishing village. However, when a TV show revives this old mystery by deciding to make an episode on it, Miguel is forced to revive faded impressions, old acquaintances and his lost love for cinema. Blended with melancholic meditations on memories and mortality, this solemn and decidedly personal work comprised of languorous storytelling, intriguing visual palettes, wry cinematic musings, and an absorbing reunion with Ana Torrent after half a century. As a then 6-year-old, she’d unforgettably starred in the director’s debut movie; incidentally, her screen name was Ana in both films, as well as in Saura’s devastating Cría Cuervos.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Showbiz Drama/Mystery

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

About Dry Grasses [2023]

 Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s smouldering new epic About Dry Grasses was, at once, expansive and focused. On one hand, its grand vistas, runtime of nearly 3 ½ hours, and a slow-burn narrative with a temporal arc of few months imbued it with the touches of a Dostoevskian novel that gradually unravels, thus allowing unhurried evocations of a brooding atmosphere and undercurrents; on the other, with just four key characters, remote Anatolian outpost setting, and fiercely tense and ominous crux, it had the air of a moody and mysterious Chekhovian tale. Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), the film’s rivetingly etched protagonist – an art teacher at a primary school who loves photography and is craving to relocate to Istanbul – is a quintessential protagonist in the Turkish maestro’s oeuvre in how he’s a bitter, petulant, complicated, misfit, borderline misanthrope with an artistic bent. Two intersecting strands define his last few months in this village that he deplores, even while capturing its harsh beauty and weather-beaten residents, which are demonstrated via stunning tableaux vivant. He has developed a close bond with fourteen-year-old female student Sevim (Ece Bağcı) – Ceylan avoids interpreting the relationship beyond what we see – that leads to charges of inappropriate behaviour being levelled against him. Meanwhile, he befriends Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a captivating art teacher at another school and Marxist activist who lost a leg in a bomb attack, who he becomes infatuated with when she starts getting close to his colleague and roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici). This magnificently shot and brilliantly enacted film – simmering with weariness and desolation – comprised of striking verbal encounters and a bravura single-take sequence where Sevim makes a temporary Brechtian detour from the movie frame into the adjoining sets.

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Genre: Drama/Rural Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Turkish

Country: Turkey

Kaathal (The Core) [2023]

 Jeo Baby, with Kaathal, took a diametric turn from his magnificent previous film The Great Indian Kitchen, while also complementing it in interesting ways. Though lacking in the latter’s crushing power – replacing that, instead, with a palette that was low-key and perhaps even too subdued at times – it too touched upon a crucial yet underrepresented topic through marital collapse. The title attained significance in how the director peeled the outward layers to reveal an intensely intimate and socially uncomfortable core. His biggest coup was roping in Mammootty, the veteran superstar of Malayalam film industry, in the role of a married man, who’s been socially conditioned to suppress and deny his homosexuality, finally coming out, and Jyothika as his wife trapped in such a marriage. Mathew, the middle-aged husband and respected member of the community where he resides – along with his wife Omana, their teenage daughter, and his aged father – is chosen by the Communist Party for a local election. His campaign, however, starts on an awkward note as Omana decides, in parallel, to file for divorce. While the political parties try to use this development to their advantage – the Left to demonstrate their progressive intentions and the opposition to spew regressive sentiments – the primary focus here was the couple’s journey through their divorce proceedings. Baby, preferring nuance over theatre, portrayed their separation in an understated manner, and therefore bereft of any dramatic flareups or malice between the couple; that, however, made things appear too downplayed in how everything was so peacefully tied up, considering the complex emotions and repercussions that were at stake. These, fortunately, were partially addressed by the affecting moment of reconciliation, elevated by Mammootty’s restrained performance.

Director: Jeo Baby

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Social Drama

Language: Malayalam

Country: India

A Brighter Tomorrow [2023]

 Nanni Moretti’s funny, whimsical and delectably messy A Brighter Tomorrow is as much a return to the wry, verbose and self-reflexive films of his past – it’s filled with infectious references to his greatest hits like Dear Diary, April, etc. – as a self-deprecating expression of his being out of sync with the world around him and his inability to fit in anymore, leading to both professional and existential crises. Furthermore, aside from its metatextual elements, ironic self-critiques, impish personal absorptions and unabashed self-indulgences, it’s also a loving evocation of his left-wing political ideals. Giovanni (Moretti’s quintessentially neurotic, cantankerous and chatterbox filmmaker alter-ego, played by himself) is shooting a film around the tremendous moral crisis faced by a L'Unità’s editor (Silvio Orlando) upon being urged by his defiant secretary/fiancée (Barbora Bobulova) to show solidarity with a traveling circus troupe in response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which ultimately leads to the Italian Communist Party’s forging a new path. He’s constantly distracted, however, because of multiple reasons – his luminous wife (Margherita Buy), who’s produced all his films so far, is planning to divorce him, as he sucks the oxygen out of the room; his lead actress keeps improvising to his chagrin; he’s heavily tempted to make a rom-com and an adaptation of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”; and the arrest of his dubious French producer (Mathieu Amalric) has left him in a lurch. The film is filled with hilarious digressions, including Giovanni halting the shooting of an action-thriller movie for an all-night diatribe on its problematic display of violence, and his riotous tryst with Netflix. The elegiac finale, one hopes, isn’t indicative of Moretti’s plans to walk into the sunset.

Director: Nanni Moretti

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Film a Clef

Language: Italian

Country: Italy